Suicide Calls for Christmas
Like children at the top of the stairs, they want the morning to be all about them.
We all know them – meticulous self-curators, tending to careers, all benevolence and bravado and draped in the banner of altruism and peace. Yet beneath this façade lies a calculating, self-centered child reveling in a warm, self-righteous glow.
Spalding Gray, the American actor and playwright renowned for his monologue-style performances, stood apart. His performances were acts of coy self-surgery. He knew his foibles and presented them as cautionary tales to his audience.
Unfortunately, the countless voyages within himself took their toll, and Gray leaped off the back of the Staten Island Ferry in 2004. His body was found floating in the East River. Nobody saw him jump.
In his 1993 film Monster in a Box, Gray wryly bemoaned his struggles to complete a novel about madness and his mother’s suicide. In an attempt to grapple with his grief, he applied to the Los Angeles Suicide Hotline Center to answer calls during Christmas.
He complained about how he was asked to fill out a six-page application and forced to endure an hour-and-a-half-long interview, after which he was told that he had to go to "school" for six weeks if he really wanted to answer these calls.
Gray, assuming the role of a spoiled toddler, shrieks:
"I hear that word 'school,' and I just go: Oh, no, school! Oh darn! But I wanted to answer suicide calls for Christmas!"
In this beautiful artistic moment, Gray pauses to allow the audience to witness his puerile folly. The crowd, stilted and bashful, begins to laugh. They see themselves in Gray. Wisdom is transferred.
Gray's bravery seems rare.
So, when encountering the misbegotten, many from the most moneyed and (mis)educated echelons of our society take grim solace in the fact that they just ‘want to take suicide calls for Christmas' and care little for the details, a consequence of their unharnessed vanity and cool middle managerial credentials.
Let Spalding Gray's understated humility be just one of many beacons that guide us through the murky waters of this performative bile we are swimming in.
This fever has to break…right?